OUTDATED YOUTUBE TIPS TO STOP DOING IN 2023
I’m going to do it. I’m going to do a dreaded Youtube tips video, but instead of just a regular you tube ‘s tips video, I’m going to do an anti tips video. You see, there are several tips for growing a channel that keep getting repeated over and over again that are just simply outdated. Howdy, howdy everyone, Nate here. I got this video idea from Vanessa Lau who has been rocking it here on Youtube You see, Vanessa recently made a video about outdated Youtube tips and I thought I would add my own take on this conversation. First one has to do with chapters in your Youtube videos, whether or not they are a good idea.
Now, I went big on this a while back when I learned that Youtube was rolling out the feature of automated or AI generated chapters up to this point, they have not been doing it very much. They just announced it and it’s very few videos I’ve actually seen it really working on yet. And my take at that time was, well, OK, if the AI is already rolling out this capability, I, as the Youtube creator, you as the channel maker would much rather be in charge of what those chapters actually look like so you can actually define them rather than having some random AI try to define them for you and maybe not do very well.
Now, the point Vanessa brought up in her video was that adding. Chapters to her own videos actually contributed to a lower average percentage viewed than the videos that didn’t have chapters on them. Now, unbeknownst to Vanessa, maybe we were In Sync on this. I’ve secretly been running a test on my own channel. This channel where I over a period of about three to four months.
These most recent three to four months, I have eliminated chapters from my videos. So what I did is I pulled a data set of 12 to 13 videos while I was still adding chapters to my videos, and 12 to 13 where I stopped adding chapters to my videos. And the results on the average percentage viewed on each of those data sets were get this almost identical.
So my conclusion on this is that chapters are not as urgent as I thought they were originally. In fact, if you as the channel maker just uncheck the box to allow automatic or AI generated chapters on your video, you’re probably going to be just fine. To my knowledge however, that will not prevent it from creating highlighted moments or key moments from this video that appear in searches. But overall I am seeing. A trend towards including chapters in fewer videos than you might think. The place where I would definitely include chapters, however, would be videos that are intended to be a guide for your audience.
If the audience is there for how useful that video is and they’re trying to accomplish something from that video, and the video is longer in length, I would definitely include chapters. All right? Next outdated tip has to do with the OFT repeated advice, or I should say mindset here, that what is being taught on Youtube is basically the exact same thing being regurgitated over and over again meaning. There’s pretty much only one way to grow on Youtube and all Youtube growth channels are essentially saying the same thing. I think that is definitely not the case, and perhaps in part why this channel that you’re watching right now has grown so quickly.
It’s because I see You Tube changing all the time, and on this channel, it’s one of my goals to make every video feel original and fresh, because there are new developments happening all the time and there are new insights that can be gained every single video. And sometimes if you feel like your channel growth is stagnating, it’s simply that you need some. Customized help.
For example, when I launched recently, the channel Makers Insiders Group is a free group. The very first respondent was R3G studios. This means when I announced it, the very first person to say, yes, I want to join that group is R3G studios, and I wanted to show you their channel as a way to say thank you to them as well as you know me. I had to give a few pointers here. We’ve got a gaming channel with thumbnails that look very aesthetically pleasing. We’ve got some good branding happening here at the top, but when they joined the channel Makers Insiders Group, the main issue they were facing, they set it.
In these words I would probably say getting views as a whole, their channel is stagnant and to this point of getting customized help versus regurgitated help repeated over and over on every channel. This channel, R3G studios, needs to answer clearly this question what is fresh and new about my content in this gaming space? I look at this channel and I say where are the original ideas? I don’t see them anywhere. And not only that, but when we start developing original ideas for this content, we need to phrase these ideas in the title and thumbnail in a way that it feels familiar and intriguing to the audience.
This video data of war Part 3 might be an original video idea and yet I don’t understand what it’s even talking about. Before I click on the video. In fact, I made a whole video about that you can watch next if you are struggling with original video ideas on your own channel. And next outdated tip has to do with how much time it takes to understand Youtube You see, it can feel like it takes forever to understand Youtube and rightly so.
It is essentially I compare it to learning an entirely new language, and not only that, but learning a new language and. Doing business in that new language, it’s a lot of work. However, there are things that I use personally that I’ve used for a long time to help me shortcut the amount of time it takes to understand Youtube One thing I do use a lot in this space is event IQ extension. Specifically three different things that for me personally save me immense amounts of time. So first of all, if I go to Youtube itself, I have the extension installed and I can see under videos this little views per hour stat.
Every time I scroll through Youtube I can see how many views per hour any given video is getting. And that gives me personally a gauge to understand to get this the current interest in that video, this one for example, it’s getting one eleven views per. Hour that’s great. Compared to this one that the algorithm just served up for me, a hundred and ten thousand views per hour. Current interest on this video is much higher than this one. The next thing I wanted to show you what the extension has to do with.
In fact, I’m going to click through on this one. Yeah, the freelance DBM and entrepreneurship channel. This is funny because I’ve been looking at this channel. This is the next channel that I’m. Going to be doing an audit on in the channel makers Insiders Group, but if I click through on the video this is ranking all freelance tasks I’ve been paid to do and I Scroll down anyone who comments on my videos or on your videos, you can see how many subscribers that Channel has. Now it’s just a way to understand where they are coming from before they are commenting on your video and it also provides some context. When they say something and they have a hundred thousand subscribers it may mean something different than if they only have one subscriber for example and that saves me the time of needing to click through.
On every single comment and just see what their channel’s about. And that brings me to the next thing I use all the time. This is the sidebar here, this vidiq boost sidebar. I like to know what the thumbnail of the video I’m watching looks like, and I don’t want to go to an external site or go back to where I found the original video in order to see what the thumbnail is. So this sidebar just serves it up fresh for me right here. I have it available, I can see this. I’m watching the video over here and I can see it over here. And in fact, if I want to, I can just click on it and see the thumbnail full size, which by the way, day is doing great with her thumbnails.
But I go much more in depth with just a totally indepth audit in the insiders group. I put a link in the description if you’re interested, and I’m also going to put a link to vinecu in the pin comment on this video with a sweet deal I got for you. But simply it’s worked really well for me and I think it will help you as well. All right, next big, often repeated outdated tip about growing on Youtube that I’ve seen happen this year still is how to ask people to subscribe. You should never ask people to subscribe in the first few seconds of a video. People are. Still teaching this. People are still doing this.
Why is Nate so opposed to this? The logic is well if people, most people leave, you know, you see that big drop off in your retention graph. You know a lot of people leave. It’s 100 % at the very beginning and then it drops 30 % in the 1st 30 seconds. So it makes sense you got to ask people in the 1st 30 to 45 seconds to subscribe so that they subscribe before they leave the video or jump ahead in the video.
Do you see the problem with that? Am I the only one that sees the problem with that? If the viewer was going to leave in the 1st 30 to 45 seconds of the video and jump heads, jump and then leave your video anyway, do you want them as a subscriber to your channel? No you do not. That is what I call dead subscribers. They are not valuable to your channel. So now we’ve gotten that out of the way here, how should you be asking people to subscribe? Here it is. Put plain and simply, when you ask someone to subscribe, it needs to have a real authentic reason attached to it.
And my non obvious take on this here is when you invite people to subscribe, use language that leads to the behavior you want. Meaning people actually watch your content as a result of your invite to subscribe, not just as a way to support the channel. So let me show you an example of how I would go about doing it on this channel. So you’ve been watching this video thus far. You don’t have the time to dedicate full time to learning the strategy of how to grow on YouTube, but I am lucky enough to be able to do that full time.
I spend countless hours analyzing and understanding and diving in and asking questions to know what is working right now, the current. Strategy on Youtube so when you’re watching this, subscribe to channel makers. It means you’re subscribing to the very best distilled actions that you can take on your own channel to grow quickly. So if you’re watching this and that is valuable to you, consider subscribing. And the next outdated tip is the OFT repeated advice to niche down on Youtube What does that mean? That means if you were trying to target a really large audience, your audience doesn’t really know what you’re doing with your content, and instead of doing that, picking a very specific area of Youtube that you own that.
Then when your audience finds you, they know, ah, I am the audience for this channel. I am not going to go so far as to say that this is completely outdated. I am, however, going to say that it depends. In fact, I’m going to draw you a visual to demonstrate what I mean here. You remember this arc? It’s from my recent YouTube algorithm video. All right, so let’s say that the areas of YouTube that you’re targeting are home product reviews, and let’s say that over here, it’s vacuums.
With this space being home cleaning products like vacuums and dusters and that kind of stuff, and this space being just anything about vacuums. So these are reviews about home products. This is anything to do with vacuums. If you were to take the advice of niching down on Youtube you might say, well, OK, I should just do a channel about home vacuum reviews. So let’s say your channel is called the Vacuum Review Maestro. So if you were to niche down in the space, you might say, OK, home reviews and vacuums. So what I’m actually doing is I’m just taking a space right between these two.
Let’s say it’s just right here, this space. And not only that, because I’m reviewing this, there’s probably a buyer and 10 people are there interested in buying their first vacuum or they’re looking to replace their vacuum. So that instantly means that my channel is going to be targeting up here a bit higher. With further in on the ring being less awareness and further out on the ring being more awareness. So someone looking to buy a vacuum would be over here and if I were just driving vacuums off of rooftops it would be out here. Ok, so the advice of niching down would mean I’m going to do a vacuum review channel.
So I am targeting this space specifically on Youtube What’s going to happen to that Channel? If that space on Youtube is underserved, your channel will grow very quickly. I fully admit that and This is why the advice of Niching down is so often repeated. However, the big problem happens when you reach terminal velocity on this channel. Meaning you have grown to the Max capacity that your audience can grow within that niche. That niche down niche that you selected of vacuum review channel and your channel will essentially plateau. That’s what I mean by terminal velocity. The growth of your channel in the audience of your channel will at that point only grow.
Get this, it will only grow at the rate that new people join YouTube or new people. Indicate interest in vacuum reviews. Now take this same example and say what would happen if instead of targeting just vacuum reviews doing the whole niche down thing, you targeted a much larger area. Let’s say you targeted home product reviews in general and you decided to go much bigger with it. And you said I’m out, sure I’ll include vacuums in it, I’ll include various other home products in it, but I’m going to target the larger home product review space on YouTube. One the early stages of growing that Channel would be more difficult. As you were building authority, but two, you would not be capped on the growth nearly as small as a very niche down channel.
And next outdated tip to not bring into this year has to do with liking and commenting. There’s been some advice passed around that likes and comments do nothing for the algorithm and where I don’t have access to the algorithm files or how it works. Maybe they don’t, maybe they do. However, I immediately follow that up with a question. Why does Nate ask his audience you to? Boop the like button in every single video. It is because I put considerable amounts of research and time into answering this question. What is the most important action that an audience can take in my videos or in your videos? And when it came down to it, I realized the minimum viable action that my audience or that your audience can take on a video that they are watching of yours, aside from clicking and staying to watch the video, is to.
Boop the like button or smash the like button or hit the like button or be it as it may and so if we say well liking and commenting do nothing for the algorithm. I counter that with does a change in audience behavior affect the algorithm? Yes, it does, because a simple action like booping the like button on a video affects viewership. It is a simple way for your audience to acknowledge that they enjoyed that video, that they enjoyed watching your video, and not only that you as the channel maker invited them to do something and they said, you know what I’m. Going to do it, because when I look at it, one of your goals as a channel maker, one of my goals especially is to create an enjoyable space for people to spend time on Youtube yes, but to just spend time in their life.
And in fact, as a perfect follow up to what I just said, I’m going to tee up this video for you to watch next because a lot of time is wasted in doing the wrong thing or doing it in the wrong order as you were growing your channel. I have spent hundreds of hours analyzing thousands of Youtube videos and channels to understand the. Pattern of how a channel grows and it is a sequence and I put it in this video for you to watch here. So go watch this video next and we’ll see you there.
